


If We Ever Meet Again

by Kemmasandi



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Gen, Other, Predacons Rising
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-10
Updated: 2014-02-10
Packaged: 2018-01-11 19:55:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1177269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kemmasandi/pseuds/Kemmasandi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ratchet leaves Iacon in search of a long-lost friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If We Ever Meet Again

**Author's Note:**

> A promptfic from tumblr that kinda grew out of proportion. Sads and feels ahoy. (I have absolutely no idea what tags to use for genfics like this XD)

 

IF WE EVER MEET AGAIN

Ratchet found him at the edge of the ruptured, rusted escarpment overlooking the ruins of the Cataract. The dull whine of the microlight he’d borrowed to make the journey south failed to stir the ancient warlord from his reverie, the metallic thump of Ratchet’s pedes against the ground likewise ineffective.

It was a short few steps to the edge. He halted at the very precipice, the tips of his pedes dislodging clumps of oxide from the ragged cliffs.

Air played around his frame, whistling through the gaps in his armour. It tugged and teased, and he imagined it begging him to step forward, into oblivion. It was a long way down - almost a kilometre before the first eroded slopes curved out from the vertical wall of the cliff.

Ratchet blinked down into empty space. His tanks churned. He had never much liked heights.

( _"It is strange, is it not, that there can be such great depths beneath the surface. The atmosphere is but the skin of the planet; here, we can see straight down into Cybertron’s very bones."_

_"You have a ghoulish turn of thought sometimes."_

_"Perhaps, hah. You can see it for yourself, dear Ratchet. Does the sight disturb you? Does it make your nerves crawl?"_

_"No. Don’t talk to me like that, Megatron."_

_"You are not a very good liar, my dear. I will take you flying sometime. You will understand it better then, I believe."_ )

"Megatron," he said.

The behemoth at the edge gave no indication that he had heard. His arms were held loosely at his sides, the cutout star in the center of his chest dull and lifeless. 

"Megatron," Ratchet repeated, louder.

Still, there was nothing.

Ratchet curled his servos into fists. His spark throbbed, his intakes working as he tried to swallow down the burn of sudden white-hot rage. “Megatron!” he shouted. “Don’t you dare ignore me!”

At last the warlord turned. His optics glowed; the sullen, sluggish red of molten rock rather than the violet which Ratchet had last seen him with. His EM field lashed out, catching Ratchet across the chest and knocking him aside. 

Ratchet staggered, and the cliff crumbled beneath his feet. He teetered on the edge, the world falling away around him. For a terrible instant, he felt gravity catch him, bear him downwards-

-but then there was a hand around his wrist, and his shoulder wrenched painfully, halting his fall.

He was roughly hauled back onto solid ground before he so much as had time to scream.

He stumbled, terror turning his knees to jelly. Megatron let go of his wrist and he fell to his knees. His optics shuttered; he reached for the ground with both servos. Grit and gravel rubbed against the plating of his palms. The chill of the austral pole radiated through his sensory arrays, grounding him.  _  
_

The shock of footsteps pulsed through the ground, scribing a half-circle around his kneeling frame. “Dare I ignore you?” Megatron’s voice rumbled from somewhere above his helm. “Clearly, I do not.”

Ratchet licked his lips and swallowed, shaking his helm. His vents came shallow and irregular; he was on the verge of breakdown and he  _couldn’t risk that_ , not in this place and with this mech.  _  
_

He bent his helm and dug his fingertips into the firmament, tracing Megatron’s presence through his proximity. The warlord circled him, his EM field licking heavily over Ratchet’s frame. Ratchet shuddered, his neural net prickling under the caress. This mech had been dead once, and he could still feel it, the dying flares of agony wending through the wavelength of his spark. The sick, sour taste of dark energon pervaded every movement. Ratchet’s tanks roiled. For a long moment, he was sure that he was about to purge.

"Why have you come?"

Megatron’s voice had once spurred armies on. Today it was much diminished. The telltale crackle of a vocaliser unused for too long blurred his syllables together, the rumble of age distorting his consonants. “Why do you seek me out, Autobot? What must I do to be left to my old age in peace?”

Ratchet raised his face to the sky. The first evening stars glimmered in a soft lavender sky. The war might have destroyed the great southern cities, but centuries of desertion had stripped the pollution from the air. The atmosphere was clearer now than it had been for billions of years.

He wet his lips, feeling so lonely it hurt. “Don’t talk to me about old age; I’m older than you are.”

Megatron snorted. “Have they put you out to pasture, old one?”

"Hardly. I did that myself."

There was a metallic thump as the old warlord dropped to the ground, not quite within arm’s reach of Ratchet. He made no reply, but his red optics fixed intently upon Ratchet’s kneeling form.

Silence grew. A cold wind whistled across the plateau, raising clouds of rich red dust which blew out over the Cataract, turning the evening light wicked crimson.

Ratchet looked down. He curled his digits through the gravel and dust beneath his hands, watching as it flowed between his fingers and built up little pyramids on the ground beneath.

"Optimus is dead." 

Megatron tilted his helm to the side, considering. “”Is he, now.”

It wasn’t a question, so Ratchet did not dignify it with an answer. He dragged his fingertips through the dirt, tracing meaningless patterns into the ground. When he lifted his hands from the design, he saw that he’d drawn an Autobot symbol, sketchy and inexpert, but recognisable.

"I had guessed as much," Megatron said at length. "Were he still alive, he would never have allowed me to fly free as long as I have."

"He merged the Allspark with the Matrix, and it drowned his own spark." Ratchet’s vents quickened, his field lashing around his frame with suppressed emotion. "When I—when he last spoke to me, he was already dead. There was a dead mech walking and talking and wearing his frame. I could tell. It wasn’t Optimus anymore, he was… something else."

"The Allspark itself, I would imagine." Megatron rested his chin upon his hands and gazed out across the Cataract. "He has finally become a god. You should be proud."

Ratchet turned to him and exploded. “Why in the name of Primus should I be  _proud_?! Optimus never wanted to be a god! As far as I recall, that was  _your_  modus operandi. He never even wanted the Primacy! The only good thing that has come out of this is the fact that there will never again be a Prime. No-one will ever have to shoulder that burden again.” He cut himself off, dragging in a deep vent and holding it for several seconds before he let go. “Who wants a god? I don’t. Gods are no use to anyone. They can’t laugh with you, can’t hold you when you need it. You can’t hold their hands and you can’t  _help them_.”

"And so, at last, you come to me."

Ratchet looked up. Megatron was gazing at him out of the corners of his optics, and the intensity of his expression was something which he had not seen for a very long time.

"Do you think you can help me, doctor? Do you want to hold me, even remembering what I have done to you?" His EM field brushed against Ratchet’s, slow and daring. "Is there something of me which you want to reclaim? Or can you simply not bear the thought of living alone after all these years?"

Yearning snapped through Ratchet’s chest. He couldn’t have held back the reaction - desperate, long-denied - even if he’d tried.

They’d had something special, long ago. He didn’t know if it could be resurrected but by Primus, he wanted to  _try_.

"Please don’t make me go back," he pleaded.

Megatronus rumbled and got to his feet. “Why shouldn’t I? You chose him over me. I should make you go back and face the Well every day.”

"If I hadn’t chosen him, we wouldn’t even be here!" Ratchet shouted at his retreating back. "I don’t regret that choice! I wish I hadn’t had to make it but I don’t regret what I chose!"

Megatron whirled. “If you had chosen me we would be in Iacon right now, victors of a war won early on! I would be king and you would have been my consort, cherished and beloved and Cybertron would still be intact! Isn’t that what you wanted, my dear?”

"So, what - you think I was the magic key that would have won you the war? You think I could have stopped you from stripping our planet dry? You think you wouldn’t have turned to dark energon with me there?" Ratchet laughed. The idea was absurd. "You made all those decisions yourself, Megatron. You never listened to anyone. Even Starscream had the intelligence to realise that dark energon was never a sound strategy."

Three steps, and Megatron was upon him. “You know nothing,” he snarled, leaning down, grasping Ratchet’s shoulder with one servo. “You and Orion, you could never comprehend what it was like. You had the fortune to be sparked into the high castes and you thought your education gave you the ability with which to pass judgement upon me for advocating the only way with which we would gain any sort of practical advancement.”

"War? War would have hurt far more than it gained, and there were fourteen billion innocents on the planet back then. Look at us now! What good has war ever done us?"

Megatron’s optics flashed dangerously. “The validity of a revolutionary movement is not defined by how uncomfortable it makes the society it seeks to change. You and Orion should have joined me. By fighting against me, you only prolonged the war you sought to avoid.”

Ratchet clawed at his servo, prying the warlord’s digits away one by one. “ _Peace through tyranny,”_ he quoted. “We didn’t join you because that sounds an awful lot like the slag the Senate used to spout. They were a revolutionary movement once too, you know.”

Megatron released him abruptly. Ratchet dropped back to his knees, a jolt of pain shooting through his hips at the awkward landing.

"I didn’t come here to argue with you," he continued, his anger melting away under the exhausted glare Megatron had trained on him. "What’s in the past can’t be changed. I know you won’t forgive me and to be honest I don’t forgive you either. I just… They don’t need me." He made a helpless gesture. "I’m a relic of times no longer relevant. A reminder of what brought us to this state. I’m holding them back."

To the south, black clouds were gathering. The last light of sunset was draining away over the western horizon. Thunder rolled in the distance, the herald of an oncoming storm.

Megatron held out his arm. It took Ratchet an embarrassingly long time to realise that he was being offered a hand up.

He took it, his old joints protesting in the cold. “What is this, a little bit of sympathy?”

Megatron shook his heavily-armored helm. “Call it what you like. This future has turned out to be a cruel one for you and I. If I am to fight it, I will require assistance.”

Ratchet’s spark throbbed with longing. After so long, it was an uncomfortable feeling. 

He trudged back to the microlight, stepping into the harness and firing up the engine. Megatron - or Megatronus, perhaps - returned to the very edge of the cliff. He leapt off, and plummeted out of sight. Three seconds later, his altmode rose into view and jetted off into the south. Ratchet took off after him. 


End file.
